Privateers

by Ben Bova

“So you didn’t attend the conference?”

  “No, no.” The laughter died. “They wouldn’t take me. I was a filthy capitalist. They wouldn’t let me in.”

  Lucita looked surprised.

  Dan explained, “The Russians had pressured the United Nations into letting them take over operations of all the lunar mines. The multinational corporation that had been operating them was squeezed out, and it went into bankruptcy. I got some Texas friends of mine, including Morgan Scanwell. …”

  “The President?”

  “He wasn’t president then, just governor of Texas. We bought up the multinational’s assets for something like two cents on the dollar.”

  “And that made you rich?”

  “The corporation had an asset that was worth billions: a UN approval to establish a factory in orbit for processing lunar ores.”

  “Ahh.” Understanding dawned in Lucita’s eyes.

  “By the time the conference in Moscow was ready to convene, my share in the old corporation’s stock was worth more than a million. It was all paper, of course, but to the Soviets I was suddenly persona non grata.”

  “So they refused to allow you into the conference.”

  Dan laughed again, more bitterly this time. “They didn’t even allow me on their goddamned SST. My ticket with Aeroflot vanished from their computer’s memory bank. My hotel reservation was mislaid. My entry visa suddenly had to be re-examined and wouldn’t be ready until after the conference would be finished. They still owe me the cash deposit I had sent them in advance, the cheap sonsof-”

  The sight of this Yankee billionaire being still indignant over a few dollars after so many years made Lucita laugh.

  Dan grinned back at her. “That’s better. I was afraid they had taken the laughter out of you.”

  “They did,” she admitted. “I’ve just gotten it back again, thanks to you.”

  “Was it that bad?”

  She grew serious again. “I felt as if I was being smothered. Every day, every night-I could feel them watching, listening to every word I said. It was frightening.”

  “I had thought they were loosening up,” Dan said. “They’ve got nobody to be afraid of now. They’ve won the Cold War and nobody can possibly dare attack them.”

  “We were in Moscow,” Lucita told him, “and Vasily took me shopping to a magnificent department store. It was incredibly beautiful, with crystal chandeliers and the most luxurious things I’ve ever seen-jewelry, perfumes, clothes …”

  “A government store?”

  She lifted one hand in a gesture that said, Let me go on.

  “A young policeman stood on duty outside the main entrance. He must have been new, perhaps this was his first day on the job. I noticed him, as we were looking at jewelry at the counter just inside the store’s front windows. He was staring in at us-but not at us, really; at the merchandise. His eyes were as big as saucers.”

  Dan nodded. “Never saw anything like it before, I guess.”

  “I didn’t think anything of it,” Lucita went on. “We spent almost two hours in the store. Vasily was showing off, he offered to buy me anything I wanted. I had to be careful not to show too much enthusiasm over anything, because he would order the clerk to wrap it up for me and send it to my hotel.”

  “At the taxpayers’ expense,” muttered Dan.

  “As we were leaving, it must have been time for the police guard outside the store to be changed. There was an older policeman there, talking with the young one. It seemed to me they were arguing, but their voices were too low for me to tell.”

  Dan finished his sherry and started to get up to refill his glass. But Lucita put her hand on his to hold him at the sofa.

  “The young policeman,” she said, suddenly intense with the memory of it, “started to go into the store. His partner tried to hold him back, but the young one pulled free of him and opened the door to go in.”

  “Uh-oh,” said Dan.

  “He got about three steps inside the door when a pair of store guards ran up to him and began shouting at him. He shouted back. They tried to push him out and he began to push back at them.”

  “What was Malik doing?”

  Lucita said, “His limousine had pulled up and he was helping me into it when all the shouting started. He turned around once I was seated inside the car. The older policeman from the street rushed into the store and grabbed the younger one from behind. It took all three of them-the two store guards and the older policeman-to force the young one out of the store and back onto the sidewalk.”

  “And Malik?”

  “He went up to them and started speaking with them. The young policeman was very angry by now. He shouted at Vasily and pointed into the store.” She stopped, her eyes focused on the scene in her memory.

  “Then,” Lucita resumed, “Vasily lifted one finger, as if he was trying to catch the attention of a waiter in a very fine restaurant. Three very big men in dark coats suddenly appeared-just as if they had risen out of the sidewalk. They took the young policeman away with them.”

  “It was a special store,” Dan realized, “reserved for foreign shoppers and upper-echelon Communist party members.”

  “Not quite,” Lucita said. “It was reserved for high government officials. Not even foreigners were allowed into it, unless they were the guests of an official.”

  “And no ordinary citizens could get in,” Dan said.

  “No. From what Vasily said, the young policeman suffered a nervous breakdown.”

  “I’ll bet. If he didn’t have one then, he’s certainly had it by now. He’s probably sitting in a mental hospital somewhere, juiced to his eyeballs with the latest brain-benders.”

  A small shudder went through Lucita. “I will never return to Russia. Not willingly, at least.”

  Dan’s eyes widened. So she understands that she can be forced to do things she doesn’t want to do. She’s grown up enough to get that through her skull. Malik’s helped her to become a little more adult, in his own way.

  “Let me fill your glass,” he said.

  “Thank you, but no. I must go. The shuttle leaves in half an hour and I must be on it.”

  “Going back to Caracas.”

  “Yes.” She smiled wanly. “My tour of the world is finished. Now I must get back to reality.”

  Lucita got to her feet and Dan stood up beside her. She looked small and fragile and very vulnerable. He wanted to take her tiny hands in his and keep her with him. But he knew that he could not. There were too many other things he had to do. She would be in the way. And she could get hurt.

  Her dark waif’s eyes were looking up at him, searching, hoping, expecting.

  “I’ll see you off at the shuttle dock,” he said.

  The light in her eyes faded. She stepped slightly away from him. “No,” she replied. “That will not be necessary.”

  “But I-”

  “Please. I have made it this far alone. I can find the shuttle without your assistance.”

  Something in the way she said “alone” made Dan ask, “And your aunt, your duenna-how is she?”

  “Teresa?” Lucita’s beautiful face became as cold and distant as the Moon. “Teresa committed suicide a week ago. We were aboard the Soviet space station when it happened. Kosmograd, they call it.”

  “Suicide?” Dan felt it like a blow to his stomach. “How … what happened?”

  But Lucita shook her head and went to the door. “I don’t want to talk about it now. I am bringing her body back to Caracas with me. Good-bye.”

  She almost ran to the door, leaving Dan standing alone in the middle of the small room. He wanted to go after her, to bring her back and keep her with him. But he shook his head and told himself it wouldn’t be wise.

  “You’re on your way to the States, old boy,” he muttered to himself. “The last thing in the world you need is her tagging along with you.”

  Two days later, Dan arrived at New Orleans International Airport amid the pushing, yammering, frene
tic influx of tourists who were thronging into the city for its annual Mardi Gras celebration.

  It was utter foolishness to return to the States, Dan told himself. Pete Weston had argued adamantly against it. The few staff people he had informed had all been stunned at his decision to do it. Dan himself knew it was risky, at best, and more than likely to be a totally useless and even dangerous move.

  But as he dug his exquisitely forged passport out of his shoulder bag, Dan was beaming inwardly. The airport was teeming with arriving tourists, roaring with the noise of jet engines and thousands of human voices. Dan smelled perspiration and perfume and the harsh scent of the powerful disinfectants the cleaning crews used as he jostled his way slowly through the long, sweaty, impatient line that had piled up at the immigration barrier. The airport was not air-conditioned, despite the heat of the crowd. Air conditioning was a luxury reserved for the summer, and even then only if the electricity-rationing board permitted it.

  The customs officer’s cheap-looking uniform was stained through with perspiration. He looked about fifty, bald, bored, irritable. Barely glancing at the passport, he asked Dan:

  “Where is your place of residence, Mr. McKinley?”

  “Minneapolis. Just coming back from vacation,” Dan lied. “Been to see Havana. Terrific town. Just terrific. You oughtta see what they’ve been able to do since Castro died.”

  The man nodded glumly and handed the passport back to Dan. He stepped past the booth, overnight bag slung over one shoulder, garment bag in the other hand, and stood for a moment to get his bearings. Someone bumped into him from behind.

  “Hey, move it, willya?”

  Dan laughed and got out of the man’s way. He hadn’t heard an angry, impatient bleat like that in years. He was home again.

  The President of the United States was scheduled to make a speech in the New Orleans Civic Auditorium that evening. Rumors were that she had more bad news to break; this time it was the expected drop in prices for American grain and livestock. On the commercial airliner from Havana-where Dan had flown by chartered jet from Caracas-he had overheard grumbling conversations among the American tourists on their way home, complaining that their dollars bought practically nothing, that the best hotels and best restaurants were filled with Russians and East Europeans, that Jane Scanwell had gotten into the White House on a fluke and she will never win an election in her own right.

  For years Dan had seen reports on all these matters and many more, every morning in his daily session with the computer that digested all the intelligence reports his corporate hirelings gathered for him. But to hear the people themselves griping, to feel the intensity of their complaints, to touch the reality of it with his own hands-that was far different from reading neatly typed impersonal reports on a computer screen.

  He took the airport bus into the city. On this trip he was moving with the people, no longer the wealthy industrialist who traveled by limo and private jet. He was an ordinary guy again, taking the cheapest means of transportation available. Just one common man in the midst of a sea of common folk; they were his disguise and his protection.

  And his source of information. Dan listened to their conversations as the bus lumbered toward downtown New Orleans. Most of the homeward-bound Americans had either gone on to other flights at the airport or taken some other mode of ground transportation. This bus, heading for the major tourist hotels in and around the Vieux Carre, was filled mostly with European and South American visitors, chatting in Spanish, German, French, Russian and other Slavic languages. And, of course, the inevitable Japanese.

  “You must be very careful of drinking the water,” a Russian voice said in the seat behind Dan.

  “I have no intention of drinking water,” said his companion, a bored-sounding woman.

  “No, seriously, they have such toxic wastes here that even bottled water can be dangerous.”

  “Who cares? It’s the air that I’m worried about.”

  “Not as bad as the air in Smolensk.”

  “Bad enough.”

  Looking out the untinted glass of the bus window, Dan could see the dirty brown haze that hung in the air, the product of burning coal to generate electricity. Without nuclear power, and with oil and natural gas prices set higher by Moscow each year, the United States had returned to its most abundant fuel. But the price for using coal was paid by degrading the quality of the air. And by the people who died of lung cancer, asthma and the resurgence of tuberculosis of a new and deadly virulent strain.

  Dan got off the bus at the downtown transportation terminal. Most of the foreign tourists stayed on, heading for the fancy hotels. The bus terminal was seedy, filthy. It stank of urine and vomit. Panhandlers shuffled around, dressed mostly in rags. Bag ladies huddled in every comer. Helmeted police marched through the terminal in pairs, short-snouted shotguns clipped to their thighs, German shepherds walking unleashed between them. They skirted the sleeping or unconscious figures sprawled on the worn, littered tile floor.

  Poverty, Dan saw. The kind of poverty that once was confined to the worst ghettos of the biggest cities. It was spreading all across the country.

  “Everett McKinley?”

  Dan wheeled to see a short, scruffy man with graying hair and a two-day growth of beard looking at him.

  Remembering the identification phrase, he said, “Well, I ain’t the pope.”

  The man grinned at him, showing bad teeth. “Okay, you’re the one. Let’s go.”

  Instead of taking the risk of renting a car that could ultimately be traced to him, Dan had arranged for a local driver. The man, who knew nothing except Dan’s alias, the identification phrase and his destination, took Dan’s garment bag and led him through the reeking bus terminal to the parking lot. Under the watchful eyes of uniformed security guards, they made their way to a dilapidated four-door GMota Corsair. It had once been bright red, but rust and age had dulled its finish. The driver tossed Dan’s bag onto the back seat, muttering that the trunk lid no longer opened.

  “You know where I want to go?” Dan asked as he sat on the tattered upholstery.

  The driver grinned at him. “It ain’t the Vatican.”

  They drove off through city streets filthy with litter. Idle men seemed to cluster at every corner, white and black alike. Poverty had brought a brotherhood that affluence had never achieved. Half the buildings seemed empty, abandoned. Traffic was only a fraction of what Dan had remembered from the old days, most of it hissing steam buses and trucks that belched black diesel fumes.

  Once they got onto the interstate, the old car showed surprising power. The driver, squinting into the afternoon sunlight, said, “She might look like a shitbox, but she got a lot of cubes under th’ hood.” For the first time, Dan noticed the trace of a Cajun accent in the man’s voice. “She can outrun the cops, you know. When I carry stuff from the boats. That’s why the trunk don’t open. Full of radar spoilers. At night, they can’t even find me from helicopters, you know?”

  “What do you carry?” Dan asked.

  The driver glanced at him, narrow-eyed. “Oh, stuff. From Mexico. From Panama and all. You know.”

  Dan nodded. Dope, illegal electronics parts, even bottles of propane heating gas-from what he had heard, the local black market made its money by evading the protective tariffs against imports. Smuggling even shoes could make a man moderately wealthy these days.

  “Fuckin’ government, don’t make money worth anything,” the driver complained. “Tree dollars for a cup of coffee. Tree dollars! Medicare ain’t worth shit. Taxes keep goin’ up. Got to do something to make ends meet, you know.”

  “Sure, sure,” Dan said.

  “You know, I used to be a building contractor. Had my own company. Made damn good money, too. Started out as an apprentice. Then master carpenter. Then made my own company. Built houses, office buildings, whole shopping centers. Damn fine construction. Those buildings last, I tell you. Then everyt’ing went to hell. Whole country caved in. Nobody building no
thing now. Most of my people out of work. Hungry, I tell you.”

  The driver mumbled on about the impossibility of finding work, and how a man had to scratch and scramble to provide for his family, as they headed out onto the highway that ran across Lake Pontchartrain toward Baton Rouge. Dan was going to meet the President in the evening, after her speech in New Orleans. No one had told Dan where she would spend the night; that information was kept in strictest security. But he did not need to be told where Jane Scanwell would be that night. He knew.

  Chapter SIXTEEN

  With the spotlights in her eyes, the President could not see the vast audience that filled the huge auditorium. But she did not need to see them. She could feel their presence, hear their voices, sense their emotions as if they were one gigantic single beast lurking in the darkness out there.

  The beast had been hostile when she had taken the podium. The applause had been perfunctory, a duty owed to the office of the President. They were angry with her, blaming her for their troubles, burdening four decades of slowly accumulating disaster onto her shoulders.

  Jane felt their displeasure, their sullen, smoldering frustration and the gnawing fear that lay beneath. It was her task to transform them, to tame the beast hunched in the darkness, to harness their energy. She was their leader, whether they liked it or not. Whether they voted for her or not, she was their teacher, their guide, their high priestess.

  She began her speech and listened even as she spoke at how the beast quieted down, how their coughing ceased and their feet stopped shuffling and they no longer rattled programs or fidgeted in their seats. As her amplified words boomed across the mammoth auditorium, the beast that was her audience began to be soothed, appeased.

  Yes, America is no longer the leader of half the world, Jane Scanwell told them. And better for it. We no longer need to bear the burdens of being the world’s policeman. We no longer need to send our sons off to foreign battlefields to fight other people’s wars. We no longer live under the threat of nuclear annihilation. We no longer pay the taxes to support a bloated, ever-growing defense budget. We live in peace, and we are no nation’s slave.